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Director: George Barry
Screenplay: George Barry
Cast: Demene Hall (as Diane); Rosa
Luxemburg (as Sharon); William Russ (as Sharon's Brother); Julie Ritter (as Suzan);
Linda Bond (as The Resurrected); Patrick Spence-Thomas (as the Voice of the
Artist)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #29
It's tragic most will know of Death Bed from the Patton Oswalt skit. A comedian I have little interest in, so I
won't unfairly dismiss someone I know little of, and the skit has a humour to
it I liked, but the real gripe is thinking that the geek fan base for him
celebrates mass produced superhero films that can't get the aspects we love in
comic books right, or over bloated blockbusters that aren't as fun or as
imaginative as the fan fiction made afterwards, yet a film that tries something
unique and succeeds is left as a joke. Even if Oswald's skit is a celebration for the fact it managed to be made,
there's still an unfair joke at its existence. Unlike Oswalt's "Rape Stove: The Stove That Rapes
People", if he ever gets round to actually writing a script for it, this
is a film that openly admits its silliness without becoming ironic and is absolutely
serious in a poetic way in spite of its strangeness. It's definitely not the oddest
object in existence to be an antagonist of a horror film knowing there's an
adaptation of a Stephen King story
about a demonically possessed clothes press in existence, nor mentioning at
least two killer refrigerator films in existence.
Openly admitting its bizarreness,
director-writer George Barry dreamt
of a man eating bed and decided to make a film about it, conjuring through
cinematic production a true one-off made with lo-fi, uber low budget dream
logic about a bed created by a demon. Brought to life by their tears of blood
weeping over a lost human lover interest, a rampant monster is born who devours
those who lay upon its duvet. It feels like a dream and fittingly even the back-story
of the film celluloid itself was a subconscious reverberation that was
discovered by modern viewers, lost to the haze of bootleg video even to its
creator only to appear into existence again decades after. The scratched film,
from the sole surviving print, emphasises its eerie air, post dubbed sound
effects and dialogue leaving a ghostliness as the manor the bed is trapped in,
in the basement, is a European gothic building falling to pieces in the midst
of nowhere rural America. A heavy European influence is felt on Death Bed, a fairy tale openly
admitting its flowery back-story as an elaborate birthing is responsible for
the living bed, a personification of a greedy, crude and childish monstrosity
which burps, growls, whines and plays sadistic tricks of nightmares on its
victims before eating them by way of an internal sea of yellow digestive acid. It
goes as far as have the ghost of Aubrey
Beardsley, the legendary and notorious British illustrator of transgressive
and erotic art by way of black ink, trapped behind a painting for a piece of
alternative history, belittling the bed constantly and the film's narrator
through post dub monologues. It all mixes with its seventies tone, just from
the fashion on display, openly taking a risk of being artsy and pretentious
above its limited budget. Risky but ultimately a success.
It's aware of its own
humorous premise as well. Unintentional irony couldn't exist from a scene where
the bed drinks a whole bottle of Pepto
Bismol, only the idea George Barry
had an incredible sense of humour. A series of Daily Bugle headlines chronicling
the bed's history to the segment about a quack doctor trying to make the bed a
sex therapy treatment are all deliberately humorous highlights alongside the
unintentional ones that are there, of oddly spoken dialogue to a pair of hands
borrowed from a skeleton from a biology class. The seriousness comes from its
moments of visual poetry. At first the scenes in the golden yellow digestive
acid evoke Andres Serrano's infamous Piss Christ photograph only to turn
into a disturbingly serene series of images, bodies writhing in the golden
sheen as the red of blood swirls in it as physical mass of colour. The more
flowery mythology turns to really creepy scenes, nightmares ranging from a meal
of insects to a book of one's death using mirrored pages.
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| From http://popshifter.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ death-bed-blu-ray-review-header-graphic.jpg |
Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique/Psychotronic/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High
From the midst of the golden era
of American independent filmmaking, between the seventies and early eighties of
bizarre genre blending and community theatre actors wandering around small town
locations not seen in Hollywood cinema for a greater verisimilitude, Death Bed manages to be even more
stranger than the entire lot of them I've experienced so far. You witness Death Bed, and the Oswalt sketch,
spoken in the tone of not seeing the film, misses out even the hallucinatory
experience of stumbling over this film and seeing something entirely contained
in itself. With no connection to other films - one movie by George Barry only, no others and
seemingly lost to time until this era - its indefinable. The theme by Cyclobe - partially created by Stephen Thrower, former member of Coil and a horror film expert who
helped Death Bed become know - is
disturbingly beautiful1, a modern piece of music melding seamlessly
to a seventies film through time travel, but the catalogue of groaning hums and
constant munching sounds from the original materials is just as alien to the
ear.
That a large portion of the film
follows a bed as an antagonist, one which manages to have so much personality,
is bizarre in itself but through stop motion, sound effects and having Aubrey Beardsley's ghost as the straight
man of the pair, the result is absolutely amusing when it's not also nasty and
cruel, a sawing with a crucifix chain which is agonising to see or the bed
playing with severed eyeballs of a former victim to look at someone. The resulting
film is both openly silly, the Pepto Bismol,
but serious and poetic at the same time, of dreams and red roses growing out of
a victim's skull in an evocative Gothic horror image.
Personal Opinion:
Naturally I love the film. Gestated
seemingly from nowhere, but able to read of its production through the
aforementioned Stephen Thrower's tome
Nightmare USA also shows it was a
creation of love and invention from George
Barry, one at first doomed never to exist properly only for him to discover
on the internet decades later an entire hidden history to the film for him. Bootlegging
allowed people to develop a mythology surrounding it, leading to official
releases, theatrical screenings, a skit by a famous comedian and all his hard
work to be for something worthwhile, a fairy tale ending to incredibly unique
piece of fantasy horror.
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| From http://www.mondo-digital.com/deathbed3big.jpg |
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1 Apparently there was
an original score of cheesy saxophone music which makes this one of the few
cases of tampering with original film materials that doesn't evoke George Lucas mucking about to the
pleasure of few.
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